Toward a Bioregional State

Launched to provide an information service connected with _Toward a Bioregional State, the book; the blog is the commentary, your questions and my answers, and news from around the world related to the issues of sustainability and unsustainability in a running muse on various issues of concern or inspiration.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Global Green Majority Organizing Against Ecological Tyranny in South America: Brazil and Colombia

Soon there as well they will find participating against a corrupt, criminal edifice is pointless without formal institutional change. The majority ecological self-interest of peoples may move toward this suggestion of praxis related to this theory. Some other examples below.

This increasing global grassroots pressure sick of corrupt politicians destroying our health, ecology, and economies is now organizing more than ever; it is organizing to participate against the corrupt elite political clientelism that makes an ecological tyranny around the world that holds environmental degradation in place politically by keeping us from sustainability by hiding alternative materials and technologies as well as gatekeeping against the globally popular sentiments of 'health, ecology, and economy' interlinked.

This is an excerpt from independent London journalist Gwynne Dyer's recent article "Green Brazil" where a green religiously conservative religious movement is gaining political 'presidential kingmaker' status by pulling both conservatives and leftists away from elite parties that look quite similar:

"Marina Silva, leader of Brazil’s Green Party...persuaded one-fifth of Brazil’s voters to support the Green Party. Twenty percent is the second-highest share of the vote ever won by any Green Party anywhere. (The record-holder is Antanas Mockus, the Green candidate in the recent election in Colombia, who got 27 percent of the vote.) Brazil, with more than 200 million people, is the country that really counts in South America, and what has happened there is...[being called]...a "green tsunami." Greens are generally assumed to be on the left...Marina Silva has the classic biography of a Brazilian leftwing hero ― born in the Amazonian state of Acre, the daughter of rubber-pickers, illiterate until 16 ― but she is also [green and highly religious as] an evangelical Christian. As such, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a substantial portion of her vote came from Christians...As a social conservative..."

That's a common theme in world history for religious movements to start housing environmental sentiments right before the whole state becomes illegitimate.

Actually, this Green Party total of 20% for Brazil might be considered the third-highest since (somewhat Green/Environmentalist) French Socialist Party candidate Marie-Ségolène Royal got 25.87% first and then 46.94% in the runoff in 2007 against Nicolas Sarkozy--and Sarkozy clearly used open vote fraud to win. That is the 'external rationale' linked above why merely participating as a green party by itself will be a failure without green constitutional engineering of the bioregional state: because this criminal corruption maintains protection of environmental degradation. (The only thing that Sarkozy thought was environmental was expanding banker wealth in the financial roulette wheel for carbon credits--soundly trounced in 2009 by the French Constitutional Court because his plan did more to undermine environmental laws than improve it: "too many exemptions for polluters" was his idea for a green revolution. More critique of how mistaken it is to consider carbon credits an environmental social movement is below, in a link from investigative author Mark Shapiro).

As Wayne Madsen wrote in 2007, the runoff demographics weren't there for Sarkozy's win. Only Sarkozy supported unverifiable e-vote machines for France which were widely utilized:

"ES&S's I-Votronic machines were used in both elections across France. Only Sarkozy's party was supportive of the machines, with all the other political parties calling for a moratorium on their use. Turnout in the French election was 85 percent. With large turnouts historically favoring the left in France, the exit polling and actual polling were at odds with the turnout -- an indication of massive election fraud....As with the U.S. and Mexican presidential elections, the polls are being artificially fixed to reflect the upcoming skewed exit polls, a major component of the neo-cons' main contrivance to maintain political control -- 'election engineering.'"

As Madsen continues, he talks about this global vote fraud against organized localism:

"Similar polling irregularities were experienced in recent elections in Scotland, Wales, and England [in 2007]. In Scotland, 100,000 ballots, thought to mostly be cast for the pro-independence Scottish National Party, were declared "spoiled" in Scotland's election. That "glitch" cost the Scottish Nationalists a larger majority in the Scottish Parliament. Irregularities in Wales and England similarly affected larger margins for Welsh and Cornish nationalists. As the Bretons and Corsicans will soon discover with Sarkozy, regional nationalism [or participative localism in a larger framework] is anathema to the globalist neo-con agenda, particularly the international bankers who want strong centralized control and minimal devolution of power to local and regional governments. The electoral malfeasance of neo-cons in manipulating elections in France, Britain, Canada, the United States, Italy, Australia, Peru, Costa Rica, Mexico, and other countries will remain a problem until the people...seize control...of the media, the voting and vote counting process, and the opinion polling mechanisms."

"The first debate is over districting; yet, no one has offered how to avoid districting that is partisan gerrymandering. Many accuse parties involved with "district reform" as merely scheming to elect more partisan incumbents by "pre-rigging" elections with creative line drawing.

This fails to create a competitive election and merely divides opposition artificially into separate districts or stuffs ballots (residences) of one party's supporters in one district. A real electoral reform of districts would draw them in a nonpartisan manner.

The public can be assured of this by making stable watersheds as the mandated form of electoral districting. Watersheds are biophysically real lines separating different drainage basins (water catchments). Drainage basins concentrate more than water.

Since much pollution risk is waterborne, watersheds represent areas where common environmental risk experiences exist. Therefore, watershed election districts should be the durable form of environmental risk feedback into state politics.

As a publicly desired neutral, nonpartisan way of drawing election boundaries, it has positive effects on party competition by removing gerrymandering to create truly representative parties. Parties should compete to represent the people's interests, not simply win by default because of gerrymandering."

Expect more open vote fraud against green-localist pressures worldwide, particularly in South America soon. However, if you want more environmental representation, parties by themselves are hardly enough because of 'internal rationales' as well (see above) so look up more information about the bioregional state.

"I do support various forms of green parties however just without expecting that the model of political change for sustainability can ever be achieved by a singular party...[T]he bioregional state argues that a single informal party is a poor strategy for change to sustainability. A single party can be corrupted like the fading greenness of Die Grunen in Germany (discussed at that link above). Second, a single party it is a poor strategy for sustainability because support for greenness comes from across the left-right spectrum seen in above polls for global supermajorities supporting green politics. This makes a single informal party a poor strategy for mobilizing toward sustainability. It is perhaps ultimately self-defeating and self-divisive of the commonality of views on greenness to attempt to fit 'green' into one party framework." Instead, it can fit easily into features of the bioregional state like watershed election districting for instance.

A more competitive party framework in the beginning is crucial in sustainability instead of reliance on a singular party.

This is achievable through informal and formal change, first, after which the arrangement itself (instead of an individual party) provides checks and balance on political corruption and gatekeeping. This is because with a more competitive election framework, the common geographic self-interest of all populations (regardless of their different ideologies) could shine through. When it shines through, it forces any and all parties in a district to adapt to local conditions to win elections instead of allowing parties in an uncompetitive context to selectively appeal to positions that gatekeep only and tend to support the same degradative policies."

“This is now the great mystery of Brazilian politics: what will Marina do?” “Marina” is Marina Silva, leader of Brazil’s Green Party, and the speaker, Altino Machado, is a journalist and one of her oldest friends.

But Marina has already done something remarkable: she persuaded one-fifth of Brazil’s voters to support the Green Party.

Twenty percent is the second-highest share of the vote ever won by any Green Party anywhere. (The record-holder is Antanas Mockus, the Green candidate in the recent election in Colombia, who got 27 percent of the vote.)

But Brazil, with more than 200 million people, is the country that really counts in South America, and what has happened there is, in the words of the Rio de Janeiro paper O Dia, a “green tsunami.”

Among other things, this remarkable result makes Marina Silva the kingmaker in the second round of the Brazilian election. It was the voters that went to her that deprived Workers’ Party candidate Dilma Roussef of victory in the first round of voting on Oct. 4. To win in the first round, a candidate must get 50 percent of the vote; “Dilma” ended up with 46.9 percent.

So now Marina (they are both known by their first names) must decide whether to tell her supporters to vote for Dilma in the second round of the election on Oct. 31, or to give their votes to the relatively conservative runner-up in the first round, Jose Serra.

Greens are generally assumed to be on the left, but it is not a foregone conclusion that Marina will back the Workers’ Party candidate.

Marina Silva has the classic biography of a Brazilian leftwing hero ― born in the Amazonian state of Acre, the daughter of rubber-pickers, illiterate until she was 16 ― but she is also an evangelical Christian.

As such, she is fiercely opposed to abortion, and a substantial portion of her vote came from Christians who were horrified by Dilma’s advocacy of reform in Brazil’s stern anti-abortion laws.

As a social conservative, Marina might even try to throw her votes to Serra. She is wringing every drop of drama out of the situation, and won’t announce her choice until a special party convention late this week.

However, her decision matters less than it seems: Dilma only needs a few million extra votes to cross the 50-percent barrier, and Marina cannot really compel all the Greens to vote for Serra.

The headline story is still the rapid economic growth Brazil has enjoyed under outgoing president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva ― and, just as importantly, the way the new wealth has been shared out.

Fifty million Brazilians have been rescued from poverty (an income of less than $82 per month) by Lula’s “family plan” of subsidies for the very poor, and 25 million other low-income Brazilians have actually ascended into the middle class. So Lula leaves office after eight years with a stratospheric approval rating of 80 percent.

He is so popular that he could choose a complete nobody as his successor and get him or her elected. Dilma Roussef is much more than that ― a former guerrilla during the military dictatorship of 1964-85, a skilled administrator, and Lula’s former chief of staff ― but nobody has ever accused her of having too much charisma.

No matter. She’ll win the second round anyway. What’s really interesting here is the emergence, two decades after the restoration of democracy, of what you might call Brazil’s political personality.

All three big political parties, the Workers’ Party, Serra’s Social Democrats, and the Greens are on the left in terms of economic policy, though Marxist ranters are scarce in all of them.

Social conservatives are still well represented in the latter two parties, but they all promise to continue Lula’s wonder-working brand of pragmatic socialism. Together, they got 98 percent of the vote in the elections on Oct. 4.

The rapid rise of the Greens is linked to Brazilians’ growing awareness that they are the custodians of the world’s largest tropical forest, the Amazon, and that it is in serious danger from global warming. That may explain why 85 percent of Brazilians think that climate change is a major problem, while only 37 percent of Americans do.

[Unable to resist: if people knew more about Climategate fraud, "the worst scientific scandal of our generation," they may reconsider the reality as closer to paid-off scientists hired as public relations to justify global carbon credit billions in profit--a $300 billion fraudulent financial bubble that is only growing--despite little connection of carbon scientifically to causing global climate change--it just being required to sell the idea of the connection to sell carbon credits. We can protect the rainforests and ourselves from carbon pollution (and a protect ourselves from a lot more than this myopia about carbon) without buying into 'global climate change' scaremongering. Environmental concern has shrunk to merely selling carbon credit futures frauds. See Harper's Magazine article by Mark Shapiro on this "carbon trading shell game" showing how fraudulent a 'carbon credits solution' is, more accurately called Conning the Climate (full article at link) and conning you and distracting ourselves from the many real sources of pollution.]

It’s a striking picture. Brazil is the only one of the BRICs, the big countries with high economic growth rates, to have both a powerful industrial sector (like India and China) and self-sufficiency in energy (like Russia). By the time it hosts the Olympic Games in 2016, it will probably have the fifth-largest economy in the world.

It is still one of the world’s most unequal countries, with a gulf between rich and poor that makes even the United States look egalitarian. (20,000 families control 46 percent of Brazil’s wealth, and one percent of landowners own 44 percent of all the land.)

But it is moving in a different direction now, without any of the doctrinaire excesses that usually mar such efforts. In fact, Brazil is becoming not just an important place, but a very interesting place."

---

Mr. Dyer mentions Colombia's green wave, and a little research reveals that the ex-mayor of the capital of Bogotá, Mockus ran in the 2006 presidential election as a member of the Indigenous Social Alliance Movement. At the time he finished fourth in the election, attracting only 1.24% of the vote. He went on to be President of Corpovisionarios, an organization that consults to cities about addressing their problems through the same policy methodology that was so successful during his terms as Mayor of Bogotá.

"In August 2009, Mockus and two other past mayors of Bogotá (Peñalosa and Garzón) joined a new political movement, Colombian Green Party and decided that one of them would run for office in the 2010 Colombian presidential elections. Mockus, Peñalosa and Garzón embarked in a very innovative campaign, in which they acknowledged and honored each other's qualifications and preparedness for the job, and telling people to choose whomever they liked best. Through a popular consultation carried on March 14, 2010, which he amply won, Mockus became the Colombian Green Party presidential candidate.

"On April 4, 2010, Antanas Mockus teamed up with [another localist politician, ex-mayor of] Medellín...choosing [him] as his vicepresidential formula which signified the unification of two groups at the center of the political spectrum.

In other news, "Petro Gustavo, the leader of Colombia's most left-wing political party Polo Democratico [that did terribly in the Presidential Election under his candidacy soon afterward], propose[d] his party, the Green Party and other independent Colombian political forces work together....The former presidential candidate cites issues such as the universal right to clean drinking water, the suspension of the controversial military pact with the U.S., plans to return land to the displaced and the restoring of ties with neighbor states, as reasons why "for the good of the country" the Greens and [hard leftist ideologue] Polo should form a united front regarding these matters. The Colombian political scene is rife with rumors that Petro has created a serious divide...and may leave the party. This is not the first time Petro has sought to align with the Greens,...***but Mockus declined the offer.***

About Me

A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.